Quote:Isnât it odd that the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department? One would think that the President would be guarded by perhaps the FBI, or maybe a crack squad of Marines or Special Forces. Heck, maybe even the DC Police! But the Treasury Department?! And who runs the Treasury? If you look, the Secretary of the Treasury is always chosen from a very small handful of big banking and Wall Street corporations. How odd that the bankers determine whether the President will live or die.

loisg October 7, 2014 at 9:44 am

Quote:Actually, the Secret Service is no longer, as of 2003, a division of the Treasury Dept; it is now part of Homeland Security, which raises other issues as being very troubling.

Jason Calley October 7, 2014 at 12:35 pm

Quote:Hey loisg! I checked and you are very much correct. Hmmmm, yes, a whole other set of issues nowâ¦.

Quote:Jon Stewart took the unusual step of airing the Democratsâ dirty laundry on The Daily Show, and it especially got weird when he disclosed the awkward emails sent directly to him repeatedly from the White Houseâs email account.

Those never-ending pitches to Democrats to give more money coming from a party that doesnât stop blasting the role of money in politics? Kind of shameless and hypocritical, donât ya think?

video at site.

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Quote:ALERT: Border Patrol Calls on the American People to Rise up Against Barack H. Obama [DETAILS]

This is an urgent matter that needs swift attention. The union representing United States Border Patrol agents is calling on all Americans to help. (H/T BizPacReivew)

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Council is the union that represents members of the governmentâs immigration service. They have over 12,000 members. Council President Kenneth Palinkas issued a statement decrying President Barack Obamaâs planned amnesty by executive action after the Nov. 4th midterm elections.

His frustration was clearly evident, saying, âWe are still the worldâs rubber-stamp for entry into the United States â regardless of the ramifications of the constant violations to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Whether itâs the failure to uphold the public charge laws, the abuse of our asylum procedures, the admission of Islamist radicals, or visas for health risks, the taxpayers are being fleeced and public safety is being endangered on a daily basis.â

Palinkas appealed to the American public for help to pressure the federal government against unilateral amnesty. He said, âThat is why this statement is intended for the public: if you care about your immigration security and your neighborhood security, you must act now to ensure that Congress stops this unilateral amnesty. Let your voice be heard and spread the word to your neighbors. We who serve in our nationâs immigration agencies are pleading for your help â donât let this happen. Express your concern to your Senators and Congressmen before it is too late.â

Palinkas wrote in the context of last weekâs news that the Obama Administration plans âto issue work permits and residency cards to 34 million immigrants in the next five years, including a surge of 9 million in the next two years. That has fed the belief that Obama is planning a post-election executive order that would grant legal status to millions without congressional approval.â

Obama spoke to a national Hispanic group earlier this month and said he would exercise executive action after the election.

Conservative Tribune has kept a vigilant eye on the problem of illegal immigration.

Please share to encourage people to get involved and stop Obamaâs amnesty.

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On the eve of the midterm elections, 42 percent of Americans endorse his performanceâand that's alarmingly high given his administration's ethical and legal lapses.
Conor Friedersdorf
Nov 3 2014, 6:21 AM ET

Immediately after President Obama was elected in 2009, promising to fundamentally change the way business is done in Washington, D.C., to usher in an era of unprecedented transparency, to protect whistleblowers, and to fight the War on Terror without compromising core U.S. values, 67 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Today his job approval rating is just 42 percent. His unpopularity is expected to cost his fellow Democrats in the midterm elections.

Ross Douthat spends his Sunday column trying to understand this unpopularity. Is Obama blamed for Republican intransigence? Are voters finally losing patience with a weak economy that can no longer be blamed on George W. Bush? Is it the fact that Obamacare has created many losers along with its winners? Is it "a results-based verdict on what seems like poor execution" in foreign policy?

All of these are plausible factors. And there is, of course, no single answer. Different people disapprove of Obama's performance for different reasons. Here are mine:
1.After denouncing his predecessor's warrantless wiretapping, Obama presided over the construction of a surveillance state more expansive than any democracy has ever known. What he hid includes documented violations of the Fourth Amendment. And the so-called reforms he urged to satiate the public are a cynical farce.
2.The Obama administration hasn't merely violated the law in its failure to prosecute what the president and attorney general acknowledge to be illegal torture. It has also suppressed a still-unreleased Senate report about that torture and done nothing to prevent the next president from restarting "enhanced interrogation."
3.The Obama administration continues to wage the most costly, ruinous war in the modern era: the War on Drugs. Obama did not try and fail to end the drug war. He didn't even try.
4.When the Obama administration kills innocent people in a drone strike, it does not acknowledge its mistake, apologize, or compensate the family, nor does it articulate how it will prevent such tragedies in the future. Instead, the president just keeps quiet. He suppresses the number of innocents killed, preventing anyone outside the executive branch from judging the effectiveness or morality of drone policy. He invokes the state-secrets doctrine to keep the courts from judging whether he is violating the Constitution. And he hides even his own team's legal reasoning.
5.Obama took two actions that set extremely dangerous precedents: He established a secret kill list, put the name of an American citizen on that list, and ordered his execution by drone strike without charges or trial or any due process. And he waged a war of choice in Libya without permission from Congress.
6.Under Obama, the national-security state is out of control. Set aside his policies, whatever you think about them. This is a president who let his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lie in sworn testimony to Congress without consequences. His CIA director, John Brennan, presided over surveillance of Senate Intelligence Committee operations, also without consequence.
7.Compared to his predecessors, Obama has been extremely aggressive in his persecution of whistleblowers and journalists who've worked with whistleblowers.

Notice two attributes that these indictments share. They're not campaign promises Obama made and upheldâon the contrary, they're all in tension with how he presented himself. Nor are these policy areas where Congress thwarted the White House. In every case, Obama could have pursued a much-improved course on his own. Blaming the transgressions on his opposition won't work here.

Among Democrats, who vary in their assessments of Obama, there is still broad agreement that he's better, warts and all, than Bush was, and better than John McCain or Mitt Romney would've been. Fair enough. This isn't an indictment of Obama voters.

Nor is Obama without accomplishments.

But here's what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowersâconfronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National-security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party's next leader.

To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.

Jump to Comments (843)

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To me, the single most disappointing part of the Obama era was the failure to ardently go after the Wall Street gang. There was a 'window of opportunity' shortly after the Great Recession started when the megabanks and associated corporations were truly weakened and dependent on government 'largesse'. This would have been the perfect time to ram-through legislation bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act and legislation limiting funds available for derivatives and other new economic 'weapons of mass destruction'. Perhaps even putting a few Wall Street biggies behind bars (gasp). After this window of weakness had passed, the Wall Street types again became arrogant and unresponsive.

The failure to ardently pursue meaningful legislation was evidence not only of Obama being 'owned' but of the Congress and Supreme Court also being 'owned'. I am afraid that our government is no longer of the 'strength' and moral caliber of what it was in the 1930s...

Quote:In an overwhelming 35-10 vote, the state Senate advanced a bill naming a 650-acre site currently under construction after the nationâs 44th president. Governor Jack Dalrymple is expected to sign the measure into law Tuesday.

When completed, the Barack Obama Memorial Landfill will be the largest waste disposal site in North Dakota, and the 17th largest in the United States. It will be especially rich in toxic waste from the local petroleum and medical industries.

âWe wanted to do something to honor the president,â says Republican State Senator Doug Perlman, who was the lead sponsor of the bill. âAnd I think a pile of garbage is a fitting tribute to Obamaâs presidency.

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http://xrepublic.tv/node/11792
Former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has sued the Justice Department over the hacking of her computers, officially accusing the Obama administration of illegal surveillance while she was reporting on administration scandals.

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Quote: "Here is how this version goes: Putin is inherently weak and tries in vain to appease the West while Russian oligarchs are making a behind the scenes deal with their Ukrainian counterparts."

Wow... this just opened my eyes to something I never realized about Russian politics.

The Western media paints Putin as some kind of all-powerful Hitler-fascist ruling Russia with an iron fist. Why? Because he broke the "rule" that only NATO is allowed to accept unilateral declarations of independence. [i.e., Crimea] This is a total non sequitur, but that's their narrative.

But the Russian view is a lot simpler and easier to think about. Russia is ruled by con-men oligarch businessmen. Russia had a string of weak rulers who were totally dominated by these oligarchs. What the Russians ask of their leader is, can he control the oligarchs? If not, he is weak. If so, he is acting in the interests of the country.

Quote:The Obama administration, self-described Most Transparent Administration in Historyâ¢, is currently engaged in a multi-pronged legal battle to prevent an iota more transparency related to illegal torture. If there was any lingering hopes that the President might use the last two years of his final term in office to bring some accountability to the despicable actions of the CIA or the US military, it appears that he will instead continue to use the power of the office to fight to keep them hidden.

Later today, the government will showcase its latest suppression effort, as the Justice Department will urge a federal judge in New York to keep secret hundreds of photos of torture from Abu Ghraib prison from almost a decade ago. President Obama once promised to release the photos, only to reverse himself months after coming into office â and heâs since been fighting for years to keep them secret.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, wrote recently about how US officials issued a âdefiant messageâ after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the hacking of Sony Pictures that âterrorists shouldnât get to decide the boundaries of our political debate.â

Yet time and again, the government claims the exact opposite under oath when arguing against more transparency: in court, the government has continually argued that terrorists would seize upon the photographs of Abu Ghraib, use them as a recruiting tool and provoke a violent reaction overseas. So, the govermentâs logic dictates, despite the fact that the actions of the US military depicted in the photos were illegal, the American public shouldnât get to see what actually occurred.

As Jaffer wrote:

To accept the argument, at least in the absence of a specific, credible threat directed against specific people, is to give the government far-reaching power to suppress evidence of its own misconduct. And the worse the misconduct, the stronger would be the governmentâs argument for suppression.

The government is making a similar argument in their efforts to keep secret GuantÃ¡namo force-feeding videos after multiple newspapers, including the Guardian, sued under the Freedom of Information Act to release the videos. A district court judge, in a landmark ruling late last year, ordered the government to make the videos public. Soon after, the UN human rights committee found that âForce feeding of prisoners on hunger strike constitutes ill-treatment in violation of the Convention [Against Torture].â Yet, the Justice Department continues to appeal the ruling.

At the same time, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage is suing the Justice Department to release their own torture investigation â 1,719 pages of reports, memorandums, and interviews with former and current CIA officials. The department argues that every single page should remain secret, despite the fact that the Senate was prevented from interviewing many of the CIAâs worst offenders for its torture report because the Justice Department was conducting their own investigation.

The Justice Department canât seem to even keep their story straight. Government lawyers argued in court two weeks ago that not only has no one in the department read the full torture report, they havenât even opened it â likely in an attempt to keep the report exempt from the Freedom of Information Actâs reach. The new chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to claw back the full 7,000 page torture report from various executive branch agencies so that it canât be obtained by reporters via FOIA lawsuits, since Congress is exempt from the act. (In an emergency motion, the ACLU has asked a judge to block any agency from handing it back.)

Yet bizarrely, just a month before the department argued that theyâve never read the full torture report, they told the New York Times in a statement that they had, in fact, read the full torture report and didnât see anything they hadnât found in their own investigation.

Meanwhile, over at the CIA, the agency has successfully avoided any accountability whatsoever not only for the torture its officers committed and their superiors ordered, but also for spying on Senate committee staffers in the course of their investigation into said torture. The CIA Inspector General who called for CIA officers to be disciplined for sparking the constitutional crisis has resigned, and the CIA-hand-picked âaccountabilityâ board that was convened after the Inspector Generalâs report conveniently let everyone involved in the scandal off the hook scot-free.

The administration has ably ignored Sen. Mark Udallâs parting speech from the Senate in which the now ex-Senator called on the president to âpurgeâ the many officials who sanctioned torture from his administration that still hold high level positions. And the CIA continues to steadfastly refuse to release any of those violatorsâ names, despite the fact â as Udall stated â the spy agency could not come up with a single specific reason why they should be kept secret.

So will we ever get accountability for torture? With the White House and CIA working hand-in-hand with the new GOP Senate intelligence chairman, it now in the hands of the courts.

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Quote:The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced on Thursday night that hundreds of former IRS official Lois Lernerâs previously âlostâ backup tapes have been recovered, which could result in the recovery of a new trove of her emails.

IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Thursday that it took investigators just two weeks to recover 424 backup tapes that were previously said to be unretrievable.

âTo date, we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lernerâs email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what the IRS has already produced to Congress to determine if we did in fact recover any new emails,â Camus said, according to the Washington Times.

In one of the new emails, Lerner apparently wrote, âNo one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other.â

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Quote:White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed Monday that President Obama is "very interested" in the idea of raising taxes through unitlateral executive action.

"The president certainly has not indicated any reticence in using his executive authority to try and advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans," Earnest said in response to a question about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calling on Obama to raise more than $100 billion in taxes through IRS executive action.

"Now I don't want to leave you with the impression that there is some imminent announcement, there is not, at least that I know of," Earnest continued. "But the president has asked his team to examine the array of executive authorities that are available to him to try to make progress on his goals. So I am not in a position to talk in any detail at this point, but the president is very interested in this avenue generally," Earnest finished.

Sanders sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew Friday identifying a number of executive actions he believes the IRS could take, without any input from Congress, that would close loopholes currently used by corporations. In the past, IRS lawyers have been hesitant to use executive actions to raise significant amounts of revenue, but that same calculation has change in other federal agencies since Obama became president.

Obama's preferred option would be for Congress to pass a corporate tax hike that would fund liberal infrastructure projects like mass transit. But if Congress fails to do as Obama wishes, just as Congress has failed to pass the immigration reforms that Obama prefers, Obama could take actions unilaterally instead. This past November, for example, Obama gave work permits, Social Se

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Quote:On the back of widespread public interest RT has decided to publish in their entirety a series of memos which were allegedly sent from a one-time White House aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The emails, which were allegedly sent by former political adviser Sidney Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were forwarded to RT by a hacker using the alias âGuccifer.â

Guccifer was credited with hacking the AOL email account of Blumenthal last week, though the authenticity of the emails has not been verified.

The purported memos appear to contain sensitive information regarding the September 11, 2012 attacks on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, as well the January 2013 hostage crisis in In Amenas, Algeria.

Blumenthal has been refraining from comments so far. RT reached Blumenthal's son Max, who confirmed that his father will not be making any remarks about the leak.

In the leaked emails distributed to the media, Guccifer copied and pasted the correspondences into new files using bold Comic Sans text layered over a pink background, possibly as a security precaution. The letter 'G' on the memos appears to be the hacker's watermark.

Below are 4 letters dating from September 12, 2012-February 16, 2013. Any omissions are unintentional, as we are publishing all of the information that has been provided to us in the interest of full disclosure.

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Quote:President Obama insisted in an interview with the Huffington Post that âby hook or by crookâ heâll be a successful president. He made the comments in answering a question about whether heâd become a âmore progressive president over time.â
âNo,â Obama said to the question, he had not become more progressive. âI think that what we are constantly doing is looking for opportunities to advance the agenda that I talked about back in 2007 and 2008. I mean, remember, in the first two years of my administration we advanced more progressive legislation than anybody in 50 years. â¦

âThe Affordable Care Act, which is working better than even I thought it was going to work, and we now have 16 million-plus people who are benefiting directly from having health insurance, and we have another 130 million who donât have to worry about losing their coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Millions of young people who are on their parentsâ plan. Those are pretty progressive.

âWhat we have done though is consistently looked for additional opportunities to get stuff done. Wherever we see a possibility of increasing wages, creating more jobs, making sure that more people are able to access opportunity, weâre gonna seize it. And weâre going to, wherever possible, try to reach out to Republicans and see if they can work with us. And where theyâre not willing to work with us, we will do it administratively or we will convene the private sector.

âBy hook or by crook, weâre going to make sure that when I leave this office, that the country is more prosperous, more people have opportunity, kids have a better education, weâre more competitive, climate change is being taken more seriously than it was, and we are actually trying to do something about it. Those are going to be the measures by which I look back and say whether Iâve been successful as president.

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A gunman shot dead by police at an anti-Muslim event in Garland, Texas,
in May reportedly bought his weapon five years earlier through the
Justice Department's botched Fast and Furious operation.

Nadir Soofi, 34, bought a 9-mm pistol at a Phoenix gun shop in 2010 that
sold the gun through the program run by the department's Bureau of
Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives division, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The controversial gun-running effort, initiated under former Attorney
General Eric Holder, sought to use the firearms to track Mexican drug
cartels. The scheme led to the deaths of two federal law-enforcement
agents and pushed Republicans to seek Holder's impeachment.

Questions on whether Soofi's gun was sold through Fast and Furious led
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson to query Holder's successor,
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, last month on the matter, the Times
reports.

Johnson, who represents Wisconsin, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Soofi and his roommate, Elton Simpson, 30, were armed with assault
rifles — and both were killed in the May 3 gunfight with police at an
anti-Islam event held by activist Pamela Geller.

However, the FBI and Justice Department have since failed to provide
serial numbers for the firearms used by Soofi and Simpson, raising fears
that the guns were linked to the bungled gun-running scheme, the Times
reports.

When Soofi bought the gun in 2010, the purchase was placed on hold for a
week, but it was lifted by authorities after only one day, according to
the Times.

Fast and Furious came under heavy fire after authorities revealed that
two of the guns were used in a 2011 shootout with Mexican drug lords
that killed U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Earlier that year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie
Zapata was shot dead in Mexico with a gun traced to Fast and Furious.

As many as 1,400 firearms went missing through the scheme — and the
ensuring controversy led the House to put Holder in contempt of Congress
in June 2012 for failing to turn over more than 1,500 pages of Fast and
Furious documents.

In congressional testimony in May 2011, the attorney general said that he had heard of Fast and Furious for the first time "over the last few weeks."

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Quote:“Has that gotten any press?” was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s one-line response to an email notifying her that the gun used to kill Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata in February 2011 was tied to the Fast and Furious scandal.
Other guns were also connected to the murder of U.S Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010.

An email message that is part of the leaked WikiLeaks emails was sent from Jacob Sullivan to Secretary Clinton on March 1, 2011, just two weeks after Agent Zapata was murdered in Mexico. Sullivan, who then served as Director of Policy Planning at Clinton’s State Department, had forwarded a message from Clinton Advisor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan. The subject line of the unclassified message was “American guns killing American agents.”
The email from Kurtz-Phelan to Sullivan said “FYI, ATF announced last night that the gun used to kill the ICE agent in Mexico last month was purchased in the Dallas- area, by U.S.-based straw buyers. If this isn’t